Nicola Benedetti: nobody’s puppet on the strings

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Ahead of her Proms debut, our correspondent meets a violinist who knows her own mind, and is not afraid to speak it

Nicola Benedetti is angry. We’re here to talk about her Proms debut — in the mildest of show pieces, Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, a Classic FM crowd-pleaser that’s about as English as a glass of Pimms and Test Match Special. But the Scottish violinist is in a much feistier mood.

“My heart sinks every time I hear the phrase ‘it’s the taking part that counts’,” she says in her cool Ayrshire brogue (think of Amy Pond, the current, equally forthright, assistant in Doctor Who). “It’s much more fun if you can do something properly. All my other classmates at